Should students who do poorly on state tests be forced to take remedial classes and not allowed to take electives?
Wednesday, students themselves responded in the Albuquerque Journal newspaper — but may not have proved the point they intended.
Of eight letters published, seven of them are full of grammar and spelling mistakes:
“I know I wont wont my eletive tooken away. wht about the sped kibs? Hae you thought about that!”
The students are responding to the possibility of APS taking electives away from students who fail state tests for math and reading.
Another student writes, “I dissagree with your oppion. If students dont have there electives we will have no reason to come to school. And if kids start not coming to school it will be your fault.”
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Ah yes. Ignorant but confident, ready to lecture others who fail to defer to their specialness.
“Sped kibs”?
That is so sad… I am assuming ’sped kibs’ means Special Ed Kids??
This looks like the result of texting shorthand.
If my kids were in school, and wrote that poorly, I suspect I would want them to take remedial classes as well, but I don’t think I would expect the schools to fix what they seem to have broken in the first place.
These letters speak for themselves.
One relevant issue - brought to my attention by my daughter, who teaches Sociology at a Western State University:
She deals with a generation that has been raised to have high self esteem, and they don’t take constructive criticism well.
These protesters are clueless that their English is not up to grade school standards, much less middle school standards. And it may be difficult telling them or their parents just how bad they really are - they likely would not listen.
Everything is hunky dory as long as their self esteem isn’t damaged, right? Right?
Well, you have to appreciate the entertainment value. Maybe this should become a regular feature in the newspaper. Each year, they could solicit opinions from students on a variety of subjects with the only requirement being that the student submit their own work, without consulting teachers or parents.
Are these letters real? It seems a bit fishy to me.
People posing as someone else and deliberately writing a letter like this is not uncommon.
Makes me think of how some people who claim to be “conservative” start espousing racism and bigotry - and then it turns out to be a liberal who wrote that letter to illustrate a point about how bad conservatives are. I’m not saying that it’s always bad liberals posing as conservatives - this is just one example to illustrate that when it’s this obvious and over the top, best be skeptical.
The grammatical mistakes and bad spelling seem to be really over the top. I would not put it past an adult to purposefully write these letters to illustrate the point that we shouldn’t listen to these kids.
These letters don’t pass my smell test. But that’s just my opinion. I am too lazy to look into it further.
To ns: I teach at a state university, and I have received emails from students worse than the second one noted above (but never anything as bad as the first one). It’s hard to know what to do with such students at a university level.
When I was in 5th grade in 1992, the school counselor came to our class once a week for “self-esteem class.” They actually called it that! We thought it was stupid and ridiculous. It usually involved filling out insipid worksheets in a comb-bound book about how special we were. We weren’t supposed to list our gifts, talents, or areas of acheivement–only complete exercises whose gist was “I am special because I am ME!” We saw it as pointless fluff that made NO sense in the real world. Everyone knew you weren’t “special” just for existing–you had to accomplish something! I’m not sure today’s fifth graders would find it as repulsive as we did, since they’ve been taught since birth that they are “special” and it doesn’t matter if they can’t write a coherent sentence.
ns: I wish I could believe these were fake, but I’ve seen too many examples of people who really are that incoherent and unable to manage English (who were native speakers, no less - people who’re ESL get much more slack), despite notionally being high school graduates.
NS: In the original article:
“The Journal said they confirmed every letter that ran in the paper but chose not to run the students’ names.
There were several letters the Journal did not run that had even more serious grammatical and spelling errors.”
Hmmm. These letters look similar to many of my college students who are teacher education majors. And, no, I am not kidding.
Anon - well, that goes a way to explain why we have students who can’t read or write.
Considering that I’ve gotten e-mails from college students that had that many errors in them (and it makes my head hurt to try to decode stuff like “sped kibs”), I don’t doubt the veracity of the letters.
There’s some rhetorical term for a person proving the very point they set out to disprove with their argument, but I never had a Rhetoric class, so I can’t think of it now…but it certainly applies here.
>There’s some rhetorical term for a person proving the very
>point they set out to disprove with their argument, but I
>never had a Rhetoric class, so I can’t think of it now…but
>it certainly applies here.
I believe the term you are looking for is “dumbass.” Yes, it certainly does apply here.
“Anon - well, that goes a way to explain why we have students who can’t read or write.”
Yes, it does indeed. Walter Williams (and I) have said for years that “Students won’t improve until teachers improve.” And, teacher education students are NOT improving. They still have the lowest ACT and SAT scores of aany college major. Their GRE scores are in the bottom ten of all professions that take the test.
But, the best indicator is the free market. I make thousands of dollars each year being hired by a local education academy to teach basic phonics to current teachers. No, over half don’t even know the sounds for the short vowels.
“No, over half don’t even know the sounds for the short vowels.”
Please … that would be “vertically challenged” vowels.
-Mark Roulo
IMHO, “sped” kids should indeed have the chance to choose between some appropriate electives - such as Lawn Care or Floor Mopping, Waxing, and Buffing. Such a course of study could give the Special Ed kids higher-paying jobs than those that write like that but expect to go to college can count on.